Thought Leadership Whitepaper
IBM Software
A candid look at employee
engagement
Five global truths

It is our hope and expectation that this piece will help you
understand exactly what employee engagement initiatives can
do for you and what they cannot, the importance of measuring
the right elements of your corporate culture, the distinctions
between universal human drives versus more distinct group
preferences, and finally, the true value of employee engagement
as an integral part of your overall corporate culture and people
philosophy.
Truth 1: employee engagement is not the
main thing that matters
Employee engagement, even with all its associations of
providing meaningful, fulfilling work in a supportive and
rewarding environment, is not the goal. It is a tool. Because
engagement is such a compelling concept and conversation, it is
very easy to lose sight of the fundamental objective: driving
successful and profitable organizational effectiveness and
performance. Engagement is not about good will, and it is not
the end. It is a means to the end and is only one of the means
that is essential to your success toolkit. If the other business
tools are not in place, you could have a team of supercharged,
engaged employees who think they are working for a great
company. But one day, they will go to work and find the gates
chained.
Engagement is not the remedy that will guarantee you a
successful business. Other essentials that help align your people
with your enterprise – combined with engaged employees – can
take you closer to your objectives.
Aligned expectations part I
You can have very low-performing businesses with highly
engaged employees. In fact, one clothing retail company
discovered that the more engaged its employees were, the worse
it performed. It had created a social environment that was
extremely congenial, focusing its expectations on a place where
happy people came to work, kept the store looking great and
appealing, and cheerfully greeted customers. These were
engaged employees doing what they did best, which was to
create a positive, welcoming environment. However, the store’s
business was to sell clothes.
A candid look at employee engagement: Five global truths
2
Despite the brief employment slump at the turn of the
millennium, companies have finally woken up to the fact that
their people issues are key to their prospects for prosperity in
the near, middle and distant future. Employers are seeing that
the talents, knowledge, availability, discretionary effort and even
the social circles of their employees make up each company’s
competitiveness profile. This is a fundamental fact of life for at
least the next 20 years, if not longer.
And so, suddenly the concepts around employee engagement
have taken on a new vogue. The conversation had begun briefly
toward the end of the 1990s under the general title of War For
Talent, but dropped suddenly with the political and economic
upheavals from 2000 to 2002, and in some sectors, even longer.1
But now employee engagement is on almost everyone’s mind
and lips. And it has taken on a life of its own.
As with almost everything that captures popular imagination,
employee engagement – as a topic of discussion – has become a
fad. And just like any great process that becomes a fad,
employee engagement – as a rigorous discipline – is at risk for
losing its credibility and effectiveness.
Organizational myths have begun to spring up and engagement
itself has taken on the awesome reflected glory of the cure-all
that promises to simply make everything “all better” by creating
happy, happy workplaces. From the employer’s perspective,
disappointment is inevitable, and a supremely valuable tool
could be consigned to the trash heap, primarily because the
company does not understand how to use it properly.
It is time to conduct a “reset” exercise and put employee
engagement back in its proper place and perspective. This paper
identifies five areas that our research has shown to be
potentially troublesome for companies - especially in terms of
helping them frame their expectations in the most reasonable,
realistic and productive ways. We have discussed them here to
help you understand the true power of aligning employee drives
and needs with those of your company.

You can have a struggling company that neatly falls within the
norms of each of the other companies in your sector—complete
with uninspired employees. Or you can have a thriving
company in the same industry, staffed with energetic, creative
and dedicated people and be blissfully clueless about what the
engagement statistics say.
Business strategy
So, you have employees who are passionate about their work
and aligned with the business strategy. But are they aligned
with the right business strategy? Are you producing an
excellent product or service for which there is a healthy and
sustained demand? Are you physically located where you have
easy access to the necessary materials, skills and transportation
services?
“A great business strategy does not necessarily
mean you have engaged employees.And
engaged employees do not guarantee a
successful business.To be successful and to have
a high-performing company hitting each of its
objectives you must have a great business
strategy.”
Conversely (and perversely), you can have a successful company
with employees who are not engaged at all. As a case in point,
sweatshops can be extremely financially successful and
productive. But it is a safe bet that their employees would score
low on any engagement surveys that might be administered. It
is also a safe bet that there would be no engagement surveys.
This company did not have a very good performance
management program, so its employees were not being
rewarded for behaviors that were specifically identified to
generate profit, i.e., actually closing sales. They were rewarded
for keeping the stores exciting and attractive. The company had
done a great job hiring and rewarding nice and friendly people.
But before long, it realized that what it needed to do was hire
nice and friendly people who also knew how to sell sweaters.
Aligned expectations part II
Over-emphasis on historic engagement trends can lead you to
unnecessarily lowering your expectations, damaging both your
business’s prospects and creating hostile environments for your
employees in the process. Another retail company, demoralized
by its abysmal turnover trends associated with its industry
sector overall, did not bother to even try to create a pleasant
place for its employees.
The company knew the industry lost people at a rapid clip, so it
just accepted the fact that it would have an unengaged
workforce. So the managers focused their creative efforts on
developing coping strategies to deal with the churn, which was
“justified” by the statistic. Managers treated people as
replaceable parts to their business. And the low engagement
trends continued to be self-perpetuating. Some stores in the
chain were successful without high engagement scores, but one
would argue that they were successful at the expense of people
rather than with the support of people, which was ultimately at
the expense of profit margins as the organization was forced to
absorb churn costs. It is also possible that if the managers had
not allowed their actions to be driven by low engagement scores
industry wide, they may have ignored the trends and created a
workplace that was an industry exception to the rule. And that
begs the question, “How much more successful could they have
been?”
3

A candid look at employee engagement: Five global truths
4
Growth and improvement
The pursuit of engagement, especially as it shows up in annual
scores, does not necessarily mean the pursuit of performance
improvement. Organizations often become fixated on the
measures that they have had in place year-to-year. Their focus is
on how their scores change from one survey to the next rather
than on how they can improve overall from one year to the next.
And what about pushing their improvement initiatives into new
areas entirely?
“Quick and easy approaches to solutions – or at
least attempts at a quick and easy fix – usually
end up being time-squandering,bitter
disappointments.”
We routinely challenge CEOs who are proud of their
engagement scores: “Okay, congratulations! You have engaged
employees. You have reached your first goal. So what is your
next goal?” For leaders who are focusing on celebrating and
sustaining the high scores they are achieving and sustaining
now, these questions mean that they could be facing low scores
next year when new areas for improvement are included in next
year’s survey. This is when we come to terms with the fact that
these leaders are not using engagement as an improvement tool;
they are using it as a public relations tool.
In fact, the most useful results from an organizational survey are
the items with fairly average scores, say in the 50s and 60s
percent favorable range with a substantial amount of variance
observed from different parts of the organization. Those are
scores you can learn from, improve upon and set impactful goals
about. Items that are either extraordinarily positive or negative
inherently have less useful information associated with them.
A great business strategy does not necessarily mean you have
engaged employees. And engaged employees do not guarantee a
successful business. To be successful and to have a high-
performing company hitting its various objectives, you must
have a great business strategy. A great business strategy has
everything to do with your goal. Engagement is only a part of
the formula.
Confidence
Engaged people will generally follow where you lead them, but
you have to be sure you are leading the right people in the right
direction. Engaged people also have to agree that you are
leading them in the right direction. A few years ago a large,
multinational company had emerged from a series of rigorous
transitions in which thousands of employees were laid off.
Employees who kept their jobs, were glad to still be employed
and they were still proud of the brand and believed in the
products. They were, in fact, passionate about their jobs and the
company. Still their engagement scores were low. The reason?
The high rate of their laid-off colleagues could have had
something to do with it. Their own concern about job security
drained some of their passion for their work. Benefit reductions
also certainly played a part of their depressed performance.
You can have a cadre of over-the-top, passionate employees who
are proud to be associated with your company. But at the end of
the day, they are going home to balance their checkbooks and
think about their prospects for the future. The result of that
evening exercise might show up in their productivity the next
morning – especially if they just spent the night coming face-to-
face with the fact that their lack of confidence in your company,
or even the industry they are in generally, is swamping their
passion for the company’s raison d’etre.

5
Truth 2: the solution you seek may not
lead you to the result you need
There is an old European folk story about a farm boy who went
into town to make his fortune. Once in the village, however, he
discovered very quickly that he must learn to read if he wanted
to take advantage of everything his future had to offer. So he set
off to find a school. On his way to his first lesson, he happened
to pass by an old-fashioned spectacle shop, and he overheard a
customer saying to the proprietor, “Thank you for the new
glasses! I can read now!” And so the boy thought to himself,
“How wonderful! Instead of spending a year learning how to
read, I will just get a pair of those glasses!”
Quick and easy approaches to solutions – or at least attempts at
a quick and easy fix – usually end up being time-squandering,
bitter disappointments. Just as a pair of glasses might have
served as a false surrogate to this boy’s ability to read,
engagement scores can serve as a false surrogate to your ability
to truly harness the passion, energy and innovation of your
employees to the benefit of the business. And because these can
be ineffective surrogates purporting to measure what is critical
to organizational success, they can certainly delay your ability to
implement a truly effective solution. In the meantime, as
practically anyone with a badly prescribed pair of glasses can
attest, adhering to the an ineffective surrogate itself can actually
make matters worse.
As a surrogate for real engagement, the engagement score
opens up the company to a variety of time-wasting
misinterpretations and false starts. Many organizations today
seek to boil down the quality of their employees’ engagement
down to a single number, or a score or index. But that index can
be misleading. It can tell you that your employees are only
engaged to a certain point, but it will not tell you why (using
our young man as the metaphor: Is it because you do not have
the skills to read? Or is it because you cannot see?). Without a
refined approach to understanding exactly what lies behind your
challenges, and your low score, you are at risk for chasing the
wrong solutions, perhaps even losing your best opportunity to
actually fix the problem right away.
It is certainly understandable that a company would be reluctant
to move beyond scores that it is proud of and venture into
performance territories where the numbers are not as positive.
Say a company has clocked in three years of upward survey
scores and finally, it has hit a cumulative score it is happy with.
The prospect of introducing leading indicator questions into
next year’s survey means that next year’s round of scores are
going to reflect where things are not as rosy. This is a
frightening prospect especially for leaders who are looking at
engagement scores (and survey results) as a grade rather than a
direction for improvement and as tools to create an effective
organization.
If you focus on engagement only as a program with a scorecard,
you will be tempted to stay with a high score that reassures you
that you have got an engaged company. On the other hand, focus
on building a high-performing, growth-oriented, profitable
company, and you will want an assessment that tells you where
your scores are lower. Of course, you still want to keep those
foundation measures so you know that you are sustaining your
strength. But you also have to be willing to stretch and grow if
you want to remain viable as a business – and that means being
willing to have low engagement scores.
As we said, engagement is a tool for growth and improvement.
It is not the end. And you cannot forget that you are dealing with
people – their dreams, aspirations and their needs to take care of
themselves and their families. You do want to be respectful of
people who work for you. And there will be times when as
leaders, the choices you make will be for them rather than an
urgent, expedient need of the business itself. But ultimately, what
matters is that you are creating what will be successful and
growing, not only as an employer, but primarily as a prosperous,
profitable player in your market segment.
Engagement is not the thing that matters most to your business.
But having a healthy, well thought-out enterprise peopled by
passionate employees who know exactly what to do to help you
realize your business strategy – and then do it – is. And
engagement is an essential tool for helping you get there.

A candid look at employee engagement: Five global truths
6
Ask direct questions and you will find that people will honestly
tell you exactly what is on their minds. They understand the
question and will answer it accordingly. And so your
interpretation of the answers – even if you have to eventually
lump them into a surrogate score – will be straightforward.
“Feel-good” measurements not only stall healthy growth, but
they may also perpetuate false assumptions about where you
truly are successful and where you are failing utterly.
When you do ask your direct questions, make sure the questions
you ask are the ones most important to you. This way, you can
be sure that the solutions that you do develop respond directly
to the most pressing concerns. If you want solutions that
provide you the results you need, make sure that you are asking
the right questions to reveal the specific need for the
appropriate solutions.
Direct questions are not, however, necessarily the easiest or the
most pleasant to answer. And their answers are not necessarily
the easiest or most pleasant to hear. In the world of engagement
surveys, it is tempting to keep returning to the types of
questions whose answers are more likely to make you feel good
– top-scoring questions from years past, for instance. But, as we
have said before, growth comes from exploring those areas
where growth is needed. And that means that you have to ask
direct questions about areas that make you uncomfortable and
that push you out of your comfort zone. You probably know
which ones those are.
“Feel-good” measurements not only stall healthy growth, but
they may also perpetuate false assumptions about where you
truly are successful and where you are utterly failing. One
manufacturing company for instance could no longer ignore the
fact that its customer satisfaction scores were in the basement.
But they could not understand why. The company’s product was
excellent and reliable. And it kept its delivery obligations 99
percent of the time – a track record the organization was
especially proud of. What could possibly be the problem?
Indexes also put organizations at risk of lumping the essentials
with the discretionary. For instance, there are some workplace
aspects that should be zero-tolerance issues. Sexual harassment,
ethics, drug abuse and safety considerations, for instance, should
not be lumped together with productivity, quality or
engagement scores. Zero-tolerance issues should not be
averaged together with organizational concerns that are not
zero-tolerance values. If that were to happen, an organizational
effectiveness expert, seeing a score of, say, 80, would think that
the company is doing very well hitting all the elements that are
important to it, completely missing the fact that an ethics score
of 80 would indicate that 20 percent of the population was
actually reporting that ethics is not a high priority inside the
company. And that is 20 percent too many in an organization
that values an ethical workplace above everything else.
The pursuit of easy solutions also opens companies up to the
“snake oil” of proprietary products and stagecraft that can be
both ineffectual and expensive. The spectacle proprietor in our
story was paid to evaluate eyesight and fit and sell glasses
(remember, this is a folk story from the turn of the century.
This conversation is not intended to be reflection of modern
optometry, so no letters please). It might not occur to the shop
keeper that someone would enter the store with the intention of
utilizing spectacles to fix an inability to read; if we are more
cynical, we could surmise that the shop keeper would not make
money by simply asking the boy the more direct question: “Do
you know how to read, son?”
Likewise, consultants with elaborate, exclusive processes do not
make much of a living asking one simple question that provides
their client with one simple answer that takes care of the entire
problem. If you want a simple answer and the corresponding
correct solution to a problem, do not go for triangulation and
complex logarithms and elaborate stagecraft provided by
someone who sustains his competitive advantage by the
whizbang.

7
The second lesson was this: If the numbers are good, the
answers they represent do not lie. For growth and improvement
to happen, the truth must be believed. And the truth is where
you will find the solution that you really need.
Truth 3: people are the same the world
over
People are people. And we want the same things no matter who
we are or where we live. And this fundamental fact is
problematic to companies that, for one reason or another, try to
exempt themselves from the engagement objective. They may
believe that based on their nationalities or generation or gender,
their people are somehow different.
Our main message to this notion is a simple one: No excuses.
Companies of virtually all national origins are expanding their
reach around the world and setting up operations staffed by
local nationals (or a combination of locals and expats). And they
are challenged to find effective ways to bring the engagement
conversation into their workplaces. Leaders in these distant
locations may tell headquarters, “Do not try to measure us with
the home office stick because we are different.” Or headquarters
may shrug off the engagement objective entirely because they
are already assuming that the office half way around the world
is too exotic – or too natively unengageable for their meager
abilities.
According to research of 40 countries (and 1,977,385 employees
in 105 businesses) by IBM, both parties would be wrong.2
By and large it is safe to say that virtually everyone is
engageable in pretty much the same fashion, from the United
States to the Philippines to the United Arab Emirates, New
Zealand, China, Argentina, Mexico, Poland and France. The
way they are engaged just might look different. The specific
methods may change from one culture to the next. And the way
engaged employees express their enthusiasm for their work may
change from one culture to the next. But fundamental human
needs and psychological motivations are constant and
undeniable. Therefore, again: No excuses.
That on-time delivery track record that the company was so
proud of reflected its own internal projections of when it could,
would and did deliver. The organization missed its target only
one out of every 100 times. But it had nothing to do with when
the customer actually needed the product. So while it was
reliably sending product through its various production and
quality control phases, customers were becoming increasingly
impatient for their purchase.
Finally, you have to believe the answers you get. If you are
asking the right questions, soliciting the data that most directly
points to a successful outcome, you must believe it – no matter
how difficult, disappointing or painful it may be. Would our
young friend believe the honest shopkeeper who passes up an
easy sale of glasses by advising the boy to invest in 12 months of
reading lessons? We can only hope so. But it is not so easy for a
business leader who would rather look at data that praises rather
than results that criticize. Nor is it easy for the leader who
favors a proposed solution that offers a quick fix rather than a
time-consuming – but real and effective – method of solving the
problem for good.
One executive we worked with was proud of his company’s
engagement performance on almost every metric he could
name. But there was clearly a problem with the not insignificant
matter of employee compensation. On this one metric, his
company fell squarely in the “mediocre” category. But he
resisted this finding.
We asked him, “What is your strategy on pay?” His answer: “To
pay about average.” There is your correlation right there.
Consciously or unconsciously, he had been relying on the halo
effect. Since his company was so great and effective in a variety
of other areas, the executive was assuming that the reflected
glory would magically spread to areas like compensation that he
thought he could afford to short-change. He had two pressing
challenges ahead of him. The first was to understand that just
because an executive could be exceptional in a variety of aspects
of running an organization, this did not mean that those “extra
credits” would somehow carry over into areas he would choose
to let slide.

A candid look at employee engagement: Five global truths
8
We ranked the countries from the study according to their
engagement scores (Colombia was at the top and Japan was the
bottom; the United States does not appear among the top 10
most or least favorably engaged countries). But what we found
to be the most compelling, from the perspective of the
individual engagement experience, was that these 20 countries
shared eight out the 10 top engagement drivers. There is more
consistency in what creates engagement than levels of
engagement. This is a critical distinction. Looking at levels of
engagement, the world does look quite variable. Looking at the
drivers of engagement, we see our commonalities. Across the 40
countries in the study, the following appear as the top 10 drivers
of engagement globally:
• The leadership of my company has communicated a vision of
the future that motivates me
• I feel that I am part of a team
• My company values my contribution
• I believe my company has an outstanding future
• I trust the leadership of my company
• My ideas and suggestions count
• My manager is an outstanding leader
• My job makes good use of my talents/skills and abilities
• My manager provides me with timely and helpful feedback
• I receive the information and communication I need to do my
job effectively
Whether we compare country to country, company to company,
company locations around the globe or even company
departments within the same building, these drivers repeatedly
appear as the top reasons why employees feel attached to the
job they do and the company they do that job for.
If you take those 10 drivers and boil them down to their basic
psychological essence, they reduce to the same particles: trust, a
sense of belonging, inclusiveness, being valued, being respected
and being accepted. This is what we each crave. These are the
emotions that lead us to feeling engaged in our work. And they
must come from having leaders who are open, sharing and
trustworthy – leaders who provide good feedback and open
communication and who make us feel as though we are a part of
the team.
Now there may be different ways that people in different
cultures express these feelings, or need to have these
experiences delivered to them. How an employee is made to feel
that she is a part of a team in Japan may be very different from
how she would be made to feel welcome as a team member in
Germany. But there is still that high desire to be a member of
the team. No one, no matter where in the world, wants to feel
that he or she is on the outside looking in.
There are slight distinctions from country to county to be sure.
But in our research,3
we have discovered that no matter what
country pairings we might try for comparison sake, it usually
ends up showing seven or eight of the 10 drivers overlapping.
For example, the way workers in India may express their
engagement for their work is different than the workers in
Poland. But it would be very difficult to find any country where
the people there say, “I do not care about the future,” or “I do
not care if my company values my contribution or not.” Or “I
do not want to be in a company that provides open
communication to its employees.” Primarily, the only difference
is that the employees of one country may define “open
communication” differently than another.
The point is, as we will explore in the next Truth, engagement is
a very personal experience. And as we look at how we are each
different in our experience of engagement, what we discover is
that we are not really that different at all. The challenges of
specificity posed by different cultures inside one organization
are not necessarily challenges of only national cultural
distinctions. The cultural distinctions (or cohering similarities)
can show up region to region, department to department,
business unit to business unit. And to the contrary, the
groupings that we might have expected to be the major
differentiators (religion, language, traditions and even political)
turn out not to be relevant to a thriving, productive workplace
at all. It can be quite common in places like Silicon Valley, for
example, for foreign nationals of countries that are historically
mortal enemies to work in very tight and collegially driven
teams at work, with that bonhomie spilling over into their
private hours socially.

9
Perhaps it will ultimately be the universal workplace that will
enable people of various factions and frictions to see how much
we truly do have in common – how much we are more the same
than we are different. And how those commonalities and
universal drivers are the shared motivations for each of us to
move forward toward a better, more specifically articulated
shared future.
Truth 4: there are real differences
Once we accept the fundamental fact that there are universal
drives that virtually all humans share, no matter where they are
in the world, we can then start exploring the many differences
that do show up culture to culture, country to country, region to
region and company to company. And this is where it begins to
get so complicated that the image of those traditional nesting
dolls from Russia quickly come to mind. As individuals and as
members of multiple, layered cultures, we are complex creatures
with a variety of motivators and behaviors with many layers of
personal emotional baggage, desires and experiences that
inform the way we see the world and our workplace each day.
And then, when you consider that workplaces are staffed by a
multitude of these complex individuals, you will see how
complicated employee engagement might become on a
daily basis.
But, as we said in the previous section: No excuses. It is just a
matter of unpacking these nesting dolls and understanding how
each of the pieces fit and work together to support your
enterprise. It is also a matter of coming to terms with the fact
that you are not likely to get it right if you try to manage your
people solely by assumptions that you draw from their cultural
heritage. Truly, the most important key here in understanding
how engagement is activated throughout the world is simply
embracing the bottom-line fact that ultimately, engagement
happens one person at a time, one interaction at a time. The
success in managing engagement is, on one hand, recognizing
universal truths and then on the other hand, accepting unique
differences. Organizations that are most successful in terms of
driving engagement balance both. The trick is learning how to
take these global distinctions and make them very personal to
the individual.
In our research, when we compare engagement drivers country
to country, some trends emerge and form themselves into what
we can call second-tier drivers.4
This is the level where you see
more variability country to country. Our research has shown,
broadly speaking, for instance, in France, pay tends to be more
important to employees partly because of culture, but also
partly because of the high taxes there. In the United Kingdom,
Belgium and Ireland, it is relatively more important to
employees to have their ideas and opinions used. In the United
States, employees place a higher value on career opportunities
than in some other parts of the world (but, interestingly,
employees in the United States and China share that drive for
developmental opportunities).
As employers work to understand how to ignite the passion and
productivity of employees throughout the world, it is helpful to
at least be aware of how national cultures can support or hobble
their efforts. The work done by Geert Hofstede over the last 30
years reflects how local cultural standards can affect the changes
that global companies want to create. He surveyed employee
values in IBM locations across 40 countries in the early 1970s
and developed four dimensions that he ultimately used to
differentiate geographical cultures.5
Power distance
This expresses the degree to which less powerful individuals
accept influence or power from others in the organization.
It also reflects the extent to which individuals in the
organization expect power to be distributed equally or
unequally. Can they challenge authority? Can they express
their own interests and views?
Individualism
Here the focus is on how much a culture values independent
behavior – looking out for one’s own needs versus placing the
good of the group above all else. In an individualistic society, a
manager’s message may be more effective if it is framed
according to how the specific goal or change will benefit the
employees themselves. On the other end of this continuum,
what others refer to as a collectivist society, individual
employees are best inspired by initiatives that will benefit the
entire group.

A candid look at employee engagement: Five global truths
10
Masculinity
This dimension reflects the extent to which a culture values
assertiveness versus modesty and caring (Femininity). It is
important to note here that Hofstede chooses Masculinity and
Femininity as the words to describe these attributes; it has
nothing to do with other gender-related aspects of society.6
Nevertheless, it would not be prudent to use these terms to
describe the culture when posting announcements for job
opportunities! In some cultures, it may be more appropriate to
be more aggressive in implementing leadership. In other
cultures, employees may be best managed through more subtle,
but just much more effective, influence.
Uncertainty avoidance
This dimension refers to the extent to which a group or
organization relies on rules, formalized processes and norms to
manage or address the unpredictability of events. Cultures that
are high in uncertainty avoidance tend to impose strict rules and
regulations. Employees themselves may be more anxiety-prone.
In 2004, Robert House led a team to examine the leadership
behaviors of 62 countries. The resulting GLOBE study7
provided similar cultural defining constructs, some of which
directly overlap Hofstede’s dimensions. He expanded on a few
of the dimensions, for instance, splitting Masculinity into two
categories: Assertiveness and Gender Egalitarianism. He also
introduced additional dimensions, such as Humane Orientation
and Performance Orientation.
The next questions naturally are: what countries fall into which
categories, and where do they appear on the Hofstede or
GLOBE continuums? As a strictly academic exercise these
would be interesting questions to explore. And certainly, these
dimensions are prominent in various countries. But depending
on what lens you might be looking through to achieve
understanding of a company, you may see a slightly different
picture. Brazil, for instance, is identified by Hofstede as being
high on the Power Distance continuum, at a moderate level for
Masculinity (suggesting a balance between assertiveness and
nurturing), and defined by a high degree of uncertainty
avoidance and a lower degree of individualism.8
But the
GLOBE study also suggests that there is a high value on
performance orientation, which means that even though
Brazilian employees may be largely driven by the desire to serve
the group, they also value recognition and reward for their
performance.9
These national distinctions are relevant, to be sure. However,
they do not take into account cultural influences by the
increasing globalization of humanity. Communications,
transportation, the globalization of popular culture, the Internet
and even the international cultural influences exerted by the
multicultural leadership in multinational companies all serve to
turn any workplace into a bouillabaisse of many flavors,
perspectives, reactions, needs and engagement drivers.
And so, we must go straight to the inner-most nesting doll – the
core and the heart of the engagement conversation – the
individual employees themselves.
As we have said before, engagement is a one-person-at-a-time
proposition. And beyond the broad generalizations of what
specific countries lean toward in terms of elements that tighten
their bond to work, it is also important to recognize that
cultural norms drive the ways employees express their
excitement for their work.
And then, of course, we must address the fact that individual
employees of virtually all nations and cultures have their own
individual ways of expressing personal levels of interest and
passion on the job. Whether an individual employee appears to
be engaged is more about the eye of the beholder – the
manager’s capacity for perceiving engaged behaviors in its many
forms—than the employee himself. Not every engaged
employee is extroverted enough to behave joyfully on the job.
But that does not mean they are not engaged. Some employees
can be frequent complainers and be the most engaged people in
the company – they complain because they care. Or they may
be too busy focusing on a meaty, challenging business problem

11
to remember to smile and get excited during a department
celebration. In fact, you can have a deeply unhappy employee
who is thoroughly engaged and aligned with your business
strategy. Likewise, you can have joyful employees who are not
aligned at all with the company’s performance objectives. They
are not productive. They are just happy.
As interesting and legitimate as it may be to study engagement
patterns throughout the cultures of the world, it really does
come down to understanding what it takes to keep each
individual aligned with the purpose and objectives of their job,
department and company. Senior leadership can spend its time
focusing on the global components of engagement, but if your
interest is in inspiring a higher level of performance quality or
driving behavior changes among your employees, your job is to
know your people as individuals and understand what they need
as individuals to trust their leadership and believe in the mission
of what they are doing.
Ultimately, this is not just about engagement. It is about
effective business management. Teach your managers (all of
your employees, for that matter) to unpack the nesting dolls
within their departments – to appreciate the similarities and
differences represented in their teams. This way you will be
providing them with the tools they need to reach the goals you
have set for them.
Truth 5: employee engagement matters a
great deal
We have seen in this paper that employee engagement is not
the ultimate goal of a successful organization. It is a tool for
creating success, of unifying diverse populations all over the
world (or even within a single community) toward a shared,
compelling objective. It is, in fact, an essential tool because
when the entire employee population is voluntarily aligned in
the service of your business objectives, almost every category of
people costs (even health care costs) go down, while
marketplace performance increases, according to reliable
statistics.
The way you engage your employees is your distinct
competitive advantage. Companies can compete on a variety of
fields. There are price wars. Companies can reverse-engineer
proprietary designs, formulas and plans to steal the innovative
advantage of a pioneer. Processes can be duplicated. Ad
campaigns, even, can be copied. But the competitive advantage
offered by an authentic people culture – the special way your
people bring their dedication and passion to work and the way
they interact with your customers – cannot be easily replicated.
But it can be measured and tapped internally to provide the
organization and leadership insights into what it is that makes
their company great. So how does employee engagement
matter greatly? When it is used to tap into a very significant
source of variation of a very fundamental aspect of
organizational performance – its culture and its people. As
organizations can squeeze variation out of their performance,
they become more successful, more uniform organizations,
providing a more consistent product or service.
But employee engagement is typically effective only when it is
used properly. It is not the answer to each problem. Just as with
any tool, it can be used effectively or misused utterly.
Unfortunately, we have seen many companies use engagement
principles and practices as a panacea. And when that happens,
disappointment is inevitable. And the true power of
engagement to affect desired change is lost. Engagement is not
a cure-all, but it is supremely effective when it is applied
properly to virtually any organization – even organizations that
might appear to be engagement resistant.
When people generally speak of the business case for
engagement, they usually speak of the advantages that
companies enjoy when their employees experience that
engagement. In addition to the advantages brought by the
employee experience, there is another way of looking at the
advantages that engagement brings to the corporate table,
specifically the advantages that companies enjoy simply by
virtue that they are rigorously focusing on engagement within
their ranks. The serious, dedicated and scientific study of

A candid look at employee engagement: Five global truths
12
engagement, and how it is reflected within the organization,
provides the company a series of developmental benefits not
commonly ascribed to the engagement conversation, but they
are most certainly present:
Intentionality
Aristotle has been quoted as saying, “We are what we
repeatedly do.” When a company is sincerely and deeply
dedicated to exploring its culture through various engagement
indexes, the organization discovers that it embodies a specific
culture because of how it has repeatedly behaved vis-à-vis its
employees. After this unblinking self-assessment, the company
has the chance to decide whether it wants more of same
(thereby continuing its already established people practices), or
whether it wants to revolutionize its entire culture (turning
virtually all its people practices upside down as a first step), or
perhaps whether (more likely) it wants to change some
practices and retain others.
Independent of the organization’s decision, the knowledge and
insights into its culture that come from a rigorous engagement
inquiry equip the company to make the best-informed decision
and intentionally choose the culture it wants to be by installing
(or retaining) the practices, policies or behaviors that best
support the desired state. Your company virtually cannot be all
things to all people. But with the intentionality that an engaged
organizational culture brings, you will be able to decide
precisely what you want your company to mean to precisely
which people. And then you can focus on that.
Improvement
An engagement inquiry can provide your company the specific
directions it needs for the types of improvements it wants. You
can know in general terms that your people are unhappy or
that there is a trust issue. But you cannot really know exactly
what is causing that unhappiness or trust disconnect unless you
have a properly designed and supported investigation in place.
You may discover that what you thought was a trust issue turns
out not to be a trust issue at all, but rather a safety issue.
Sustainability
With the intentionality and improvement fundamentals that an
engagement process can put into place, you will be able to
identify those cultural attributes and behaviors that can carry
your organization through virtually any contingencies. You will
be able to make plans and choices that preserve the core
elements of what your company’s employee value proposition
is, while jettisoning (or adding on) components that are
optional. But throughout the changes, the self-knowledge that
your engagement inquiry provides your company will keep its
core identity intact.
Reputation
Just as companies are becoming more fluent in the essential
elements of a corporate culture that promotes engagement, the
general public is as well. Current and potential employees, the
business media and community, and industry leaders are
watching you and what you are doing. Once you identify and
establish the essentials of your engaged organizational culture,
it can go public – whether you intentionally put it out there or
not. Your behaviors, choices and announcements can
cumulatively build your reputation. With your intentional
approach to engagement, you will be able to intentionally build
that reputation to reflect the characteristics that you have
determined to be essential to your high-performing
organization. In this way you will be able to cultivate an
authentic reputation of consistent values, behaviors, culture
and people attitudes – no matter whether you are strictly a
local business or a large multinational corporate with locations
on virtually all continents.

13
Summary, conclusions and
recommendations
In recent years, the topic of employee engagement has assumed
such a compelling level of fashionability that we have seen that
the actual practice of engaging employees loose both its
professional rigor and sharp focus. Employee engagement is
now seen as the thing to do rather than one of many tools
essential to the cultivation of a prospering company. While we
are, of course, champions of employee engagement and
virtually all that it truly stands for, we feel that it was important
to return the engagement conversation to the result that really
matters – the profitable enterprise.
In this paper, our purpose was to invite you to look at the
entire topic of employee engagement from a fresh perspective
and see it not as a panacea, but as essential to organizational
success. And we would like to close with a few summary
conclusions and recommendations:
Put engagement in its proper place and perspective
Employee engagement primarily only works when it is aligned
with a thoroughly considered business strategy. Remember that
a successful business strategy can create a profitable company
without employee engagement (although we most emphatically
would not recommend it). But employee engagement cannot
on its, own create and sustain a thriving company without a
solid business strategy to drive it.
Measure the right things
Make sure you have identified those behaviors and cultural
characteristics that are most relevant to your success. And
measure those by asking direct questions. You do not have to
get fancy with your approach to drawing candor from your
people. When you ask with sincere interest, they will answer
you in kind: openly and honestly.
Do not fall in love with your favorite engagement
scores
Employee surveys are not vanity tools. They are tools for
helping you improve, not preen. Be proud of those cultural
elements that are important to you and that you perform well
in. Just remember that there will almost always be areas ripe
for improvement. Even though you will net low scores in those
areas this year, they pose new opportunities for improvement,
which you might be able to feel proud of next year.
People are the same virtually everywhere
No matter who we are, where we live, what part of the world
we come from, we are the same in that we want to take care of
ourselves and our families in workplaces where we are safe and
treated with respect and dignity.
People are different virtually everywhere
Country to country, region to region, company to company
and even department to department, we belong to groups that
inform our desires, behaviors and expectations.
Assume nothing
The world is changing at such a rapid clip that broad
generalities from country to country that may have been
relevant 10 years ago might be meaningless today. If you want
to capture the hearts, imaginations and discretionary efforts of
your employees, roll up your sleeves and get ready for some
serious effort. It is going to be a one-person-at-a-time
proposition.
Get your fundamentals right before moving on to
more elaborate goals
Pick the cultural areas and employee value propositions in
which you want to excel. And start with those. No organization
has the resources, wherewithal, time, energy and money to be
world class-level exceptional in virtually everything.
You do not have to be perfect. You just have to be sincere.
Employee engagement is an endurance endeavor. If you start it,
be prepared to be in it for the duration of your career or your
company’s lifespan. But if faced with the choice between
perfection and sincerity, choose sincerity. Striving for
perfection can wear you out. Your sincerity will sustain you.
For more information
To learn how to build a smarter workforce, visit:
ibm.com/social-business

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1 Handfield-Jones, Helen, Axelrod, Beth, and Michaels, Ed, “The War for
Talent”, Harvard Business Press, 2001 ISBN 1-57851-459-2, ISBN
978-1-57851-459-5. The war for talent refers to an increasingly
competitive landscape for recruiting and retaining talented employees.
In the book, Michaels, et al., describe not a set of superior Human
Resources processes, but a mindset that emphasizes the importance of
talent to the success of organizations.
2 Kenexa WorkTrends Survey, 2012. In its current form, WorkTrends is
a multi-topic survey completed online by a sample of employees
representative of a country’s working population in terms of industry
mix, job type, gender, age and other key organizational and
demographic variables. In most countries, survey takers must be adults
who work full-time for an organization of 100 employees or more; this
threshold drops to 25 employees or more in countries with smaller
economies or hard-to-reach populations. The survey has over 200
items that cover a wide range of workplace issues, including senior
leader and direct manager effectiveness, recognition, growth and
development, employee engagement, customer orientation, quality
emphasis, innovation, corporate social responsibility, workplace safety,
work stress and performance confidence. In 2012, over 33,000
employees were surveyed, representing 28 countries.
3 Ibid, 2012
4 Ibid, 2012
5 Hofstede, Geert, Management behavior: IBM and Geert Hofstede’s
study, October, 2006, http://www.helium.com/items/82969-
management-behavior-ibm-and-geert-hofstedes-study
6 Ibid, 2006
7 House, Robert J., Culture and Leader Effectiveness: The GLOBE Study,
2004, http://www.inspireimagineinnovate.com/PDF/GLOBEsummary-
by-Michael-H-Hoppe.pdf
8 Ibid, 2004
9 Ibid, 2004